This chapter examines the first two essays of Nietzsche's genealogy from a relational perspective, suggesting that naturalistic and other common interpretations of this text fail to do justice to the excessive, negative character of suffered history . Such interpretations often resort to quasi-metaphysical accounts of repression or instincts to explain the origins of bad conscience . Nietzsche's position should rather be seen as proto-psychoanalytic in that his notion of bad conscience is best understood as a type of symptom, precisely because its source is not a naturalistically conceived cause, but rather a socially conditioned, concretely and symbolically mediated ordeal. This problem can be connected to passages in which Nietzsche discusses the suffered, social dimensions of shame and liberation.